


Joining and Joined

by TheMoments (TBs_LMC)



Category: Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Best Friends, F/M, Grey Warden Joining, Grey Wardens, Married Couple, Not Canon Compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:46:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28249350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TBs_LMC/pseuds/TheMoments
Summary: Two men who love the same woman have a talk during a short stop in the Temple of Sacred Ashes. Then she joins them and sets a few things straight.There's a hint of pre-polyamory if you squint and put on your M/M/F glasses long enough to peer through the fog.
Relationships: Zevran Arainai/Female Cousland
Kudos: 4





	Joining and Joined

**Author's Note:**

> This is definitely not canon compliant for my female Cousland (given name Christine) and her romantic partner, Zevran. However, it takes place in a way that definitely could have occurred in the game, during the team's quest to find the Urn of Sacred Ashes.

**JOINING AND JOINED**

* * *

Zevran waited until he heard Christine’s voice questioning and Brother Genitivi’s response before he spoke, watching as Alistair twitchily circled the small room they’d temporarily holed up in while waiting for Christine to investigate with the scholar, some writings they’d found in the room with Archon Hessarian’s statue.

“Alistair, if I may have a word?”

Alistair turned to face the elf he’d at first mistrusted, then detested as he vied for their lady’s affections, then felt emasculated by when the assassin had won her heart, and didn’t know how to feel about anymore after watching the two of them become something like a whole person from the periphery of their little group’s vision for the past six months now. Rather than speak, he simply nodded and raised an eyebrow. More out of not trusting his own voice than anything.

“I…” It was uncharacteristic for Zevran not to act self-assured, yet more often of late he’d seen him act normal, even – dare he think it – vulnerable, especially in Christine’s presence. “I have been thinking a great deal about the Grey Warden organization.”

Now that was a surprise. “Oh?”

“Yes. You see, it occurs to me that for the greater part of a year now I have been by yours and Christine’s sides on your Grey Warden quest, and that this trip to snatch dust from the Urn of the Sacred Ashes draws us only nearer and nearer our final destination.”

“The battle with the archdemon, yes,” Alistair nodded. Obviously, the same thoughts that had been occupying his mind had been with the elf as well.

“It also occurs to me that you might need more help than you realize when that fateful day arrives, which I fear will be sooner than anyone believes.”

Or not. “Come again?”

“Thanks to you and Christine, the dwarven armies, including Legion of the Dead, and the Dalish, and so many humans from all over Ferelden, have agreed to band together to fight the darkspawn, to defeat the archdemon once and for all. And you have, of course, amassed an excellent strike team in all the rest of us.”

“I sense a ‘but’.”

“Yes, and not the sexy kind,” Zevran quipped, though it seemed more of an automatic response that lacked his usual lasciviousness. “The but, dear Alistair, is: But you have not actually created any new Grey Wardens, in spite of the fact that you uncovered, together with the treaties returned to you by Flemeth, the entire joining ritual, including the method for creating the darkspawn blood concoction a recruit must drink.”

Alistair nodded. “No, you’re right, it’s true. Our focus has been on settling the Civil War before it tears us so asunder that there won’t be enough of a unified front to make a dent in the Blight.” The man shook his head, sagging back against the wall, his newly acquired Templar Knight-Commander’s heavy armor they’d found for him clanking against ancient stone. “There’s only the two of us,” he whispered, as though to himself. “And we’ve been fighting and traveling day in and day out without a moment’s rest for almost nine months.” He let out a long, slow breath as Zevran approached him. “But you’re not wrong. It’s something we’ve neglected in favor of seemingly higher priorities.”

“Have your reservations regarding recruitment been because of losing Duncan?”

“What?” Alistair so desperately wanted to give him shit but he couldn’t because the damned assassin always seemed to be able to suss out the truth no matter how a body tried to hide it. “Yes, all right, yes, I…I stood by and watched one of the recruits who came through with me, and the two that came through with Christine, die on the spot.”

Alistair shook his head as he remembered Duncan gutting Ser Jory, the recruit with the wife whose child would never meet its father, all because he suddenly didn’t want to drink the potion after seeing it kill Daveth. And who could blame him, really? Yet Alistair had simply stood there and let him do it, after having only been a Warden for six months by that point, not thinking he had any right to challenge a man he’d never taken from the pedestal he’d been on from the moment he’d gotten him away from that godawful Templar life.

Now…could he possibly walk Thedas recruiting the best and brightest candidates as Duncan had, only to stand and watch the blood magic ritual kill them one by one if they didn’t have the fortitude to live through it? Could he put his sword through a recruit who tried backing out? Could Christine? She hadn’t seemed daunted by Jory’s or Daveth’s passing, but back then she’d also been a painfully shy and quiet young noble whose life had been irrevocably altered and saddened by Arl Howe’s attack upon her home and the resulting deaths of her parents, never mind that her one and only sibling was still missing and presumed dead. Alistair was the poorer for never having asked, or pried, into how Christine was feeling or what she was thinking, as she had, him. What a poor friend he was.

“The reason I bring this up,” Zevran continued, after watching the myriad of thoughts and emotions play through his companion’s face, “is because I want to become a Grey Warden.”

Alistair’s eyes grew wide, head whipping up so he could look directly into Zevran’s eyes. “You’re joking.”

They heard the Mabari’s happy bark distantly echo around the massive halls and corridors.

“I have never been more serious in my entire life.” Zev closed his eyes, inhaled and exhaled slowly. “If you are concerned about skill because I failed to kill Christine – which I knew I would when I took the assignment, as you well know – then consider that I have been fighting alongside you both these past nine months, proving time and again that I have the skill and fortitude to help you keep the creatures at bay. I have fought them on the Dark Roads and on the surface. As you well know, our parties nearly always consist of you, me, Christine and the Mabari, so you have had plenty of opportunities to witness my accomplishments in battle.”

“And?” Alistair prompted when the elf hesitated, once again uncharacteristically.

From the front hall, Christine’s light, tinkling laughter echoed back to them. Zevran took a deep, ragged breath. “And I cannot live without her,” he admitted. “If she is to…” He swallowed, unable to continue for a moment, and Alistair’s heart clutched in his chest because he _felt_ that emotion very well indeed.

“I know, my friend,” Alistair said, at last finding the wavelength of kinship that had eluded them for so long.

“Because you love her, too.”

“I’m not going to get into a fight with you about her. She chose you and I will always respect that, Zev.”

“I don’t want to fight with you. I never did. I want to protect her as much as you do. And if…for any reason, anyone’s time is cut short, I would take to my grave the knowledge that she is not left alone in either her abilities or her eventual suffering.”

A sudden thought occurred to Alistair. He pushed himself off the wall and got all up into Zev’s personal space. “You mean to kill the archdemon when the time comes. For this Blight, I mean.”

Zevran turned away and bowed his head. “I cannot live without her. I have thought of little else for six months, Alistair. If she were to perform the deed…” He sucked in a ragged, shaky breath, then turned back to face the man who was, quite suddenly, his only other friend in the world besides the woman he craved with every breath he took. “You have seen me battle dragons and ogres. You know I am able to leap to their heads, destroy them completely, finish the job.”

“Yes, you’re quite capable. But so am I. And I daresay, so is Christine.”

“So…what? You’ve decided you’re going to be the one to slay the archdemon, which then leaves her completely alone as the one and only Warden in a Blight-sickened land, with you no longer able to be there with her? _For_ her? How can she rebuild the organization alone? Bah!” Zev spat, whirling in an angry circle. “How insufferably selfish can you be?”

“She has _you_!” Alistair practically yelled, throwing his hands up in the air before smacking the wall with the butt of his sword hand. “If – _when_ – I kill the beast, I will have done what I promised Duncan I would do, and I will join him and Cailan in the presence of the Maker, where I have belonged since the night I lost a man I idolized and my half-brother all at once. _You_ will be here still to take care of and protect Christine. That’s what she wants, Zev. _Who_ she wants. It has to be you and she who survive.”

“And what if it’s not?” Zevran asked softly. “You know as well as I that more things on a battlefield of darkspawn can take your life than the biggest, baddest fiend you can see. Anything could happen to _any_ of us without a dragon in sight. What if both you _and_ she fall? Who will there be to stop the Blight then, mm? This Riordan whom we found in Arl Howe’s dungeons? Great, so there are three of you. Is that enough to guarantee success? When have only three Grey Wardens stood against a Blight? _Ever_?”

In his single-track thought process to spare Christine’s life, Alistair had not considered any of that. He couldn’t deny Zev’s logic, nor the way his heart sank to his toes when the reality of their journey’s end started creeping into the edges of the room like elvhen-carved ironwood darkspawn statues sliding into place to trap him so there _was_ no way out. For any of them.

“You do realize,” Alistair finally breathed, “that you may simply die on the spot during the joining, and that if you don’t even tell her you’re attempting it, and forbid me from doing so, I’m going to have to lie to my best friend for as long as we live about what happened to you.”

“Yes, well, I will be dead and that will be your problem.”

Alistair glared at him, but it melted away when he saw the misery on Zevran’s face. “Do you really wish to both shorten and dedicate your life to this cause?” he asked. “Do you understand what that means?”

Zevran’s face twisted angrily. “I certainly understand it much better than _she_ did when she agreed to join!” he hissed.

Alistair flinched. The man wasn’t wrong. To nonchalantly tell Christine she had only about 30 years left and oh, by the way, guess what, you have to _die_ to kill the darkspawn, well…he was glad it was Riordan who’d done the latter when they’d met up at Eamon’s estate. Oh, Christine had been angry. _So_ angry. They’d quarreled and she’d avoided him for a week until eventually the Grey Warden business had forced them back together.

She’d gotten over it, or so Alistair had thought. Evidently she’d talked it over with her…what was Zevran, anyway? Her lover? No, even Alistair knew those two were much more together than casual lovers.

“The two of you,” he finally said, voice soft as he recalled his observations, “I’ve been watching you for the past many weeks. You’re like…one person in two bodies now. You almost don’t even need to speak. When there’s a lock she spies, or a trap that needs disarming, or she wants some scouting up ahead, she just says some…term of endearment…and you automatically seem to know exactly what she needs and where to go to take care of it.”

Zevran smiled, eyes glazing over distantly, and Alistair’s chest felt oh-so-tight at the clearly all-consuming love Zevran felt for Warden Number Two.

“You move like a well-oiled machine when you fight. She’s always aware of where you are even if she can’t directly see you. I have witnessed her become surrounded by bandits or darkspawn and been unable to free myself to her defense, yet quite literally out of nowhere you charge in and slice everyone around her to ribbons before I can even register what’s happened.”

The elf couldn’t help but laugh. “Don’t be so mystified by it, my friend,” he stated, that look of a man head over heels in love permeating the entire room. “The last time we visited our Dalish friends, when we went to look for Wynne’s former pupil, Keeper Lanaya agreed to perform a very special elvhen ceremony for Christine and I.”

Alistair blinked. “An elvhen ceremony? What for?”

“It is the equivalent of what the Chantry would call a marriage, but it also involves a certain level of…how shall I say it…mental pairing when a mage is involved. It is a joining of an altogether different kind, and it allows us to go beyond a standard relationship. Apparently, it is not very common, but because Christine is a powerful mage, she was able to complete it even though she has no elf blood within her.” He half-shrugged, and quite sheepishly, too. “I would find a way to give her the moon if she asked for it.”

As Alistair’s brain stuttered over the word ‘marriage,’ both men were startled by a familiar voice chiming in as the woman in question rejoined them. “Yes, it’s a union that usually only a Keeper and the one or two other mages a Dalish clan keeps around can undertake because it involves a blood-magic-induced tether between the mage and their intended.”

“You…you’re married? Em…blood married? And how not-right does that sound…”

The way Christine and Zevran smiled into each other’s eyes answered the question for him. Suddenly Alistair just wanted to burst completely out of his own skin with a joy that overtook him like a small child receiving praise from the person who mattered to him the most. He ran up to his friends, enveloped them one in each arm and hugged them tightly.

“Congratulations,” he breathed, laughing when they laughed, realizing that yes, all was right with the world because suddenly everything had just slotted into place for him. This was no longer a “he stole the girl I loved from me” in his mind. Now it was “she’s his wife and I still get to keep her as my best friend and he trusts me and trusts me with _her_ and…” Alistair was fit to burst.

At last the couple pushed him away, Zevran muttering something about “handsy humans” but the mood sobered when Christine became stern. “Now, about the other part of the discussion you were having when you weren’t aware that I was standing just outside the door.”

Zevran hung his head guiltily in a mirror of Alistair’s gesture. “I am the odd man out,” the former protested before Christine could give him a hard time for what he’d asked Alistair to do.

“Number One: It is not ever my decision whether another person wishes to join the Wardens.” She locked eyes with her husband. “If you truly want this to become your life, and will abide by whatever happens beyond the Blight, wherever that takes us to be assigned, whatever Weisshaupt wants us to do, then I will recruit you myself, _mi amoro_.”

A smile lit up the assassin’s face.

“Number Two.” And this time she looked sternly at Alistair. “I will not have anyone in my life deciding my fate for me. I was only eighteen when I chose to become a Grey Warden. I am not happy about certain things having been kept from me, but I have made my peace with it and if Zev does join, I will be able to say that I am with my two best friends in the entire world, the three of us walking boldly through the unknown, each willing to sacrifice himself or herself in the name of the greater good.”

“You humble and shame me, my lady,” Alistair whispered, hand over his chest, bowing in reverence.

“I would rather die myself than lose either of you, and I daresay if asked, each of you would say the same about the other two of us.”

“Yes,” Alistair said, looking at Zev with new eyes. “I believe I would.”

“As I already have,” Zevran acknowledged.

“Zev, you know more than either Alistair or I did when we joined. Do you still want to try it, knowing it could…” Christine huffed out a breath that sounded a little bit heartbroken, shoving it down, sticking to her Grey Warden persona. “Knowing that you may not survive the ritual?”

He got down on one knee, took her hand and kissed the back of it. “I am supposed to be dead already, twice over. First by your hand and then by Taliesen’s. If I die trying to become the man that loving you has made me understand you deserve, then I will leave this life knowing that you will always have Alistair by your side.”

Alistair stood up a little straighter and felt his throat tighten. “I swear it to you both,” he said firmly, clapping his fist to his armored chest and stomping one foot for good measure. “I don’t feel like I deserve either of you,” he added.

“Same,” Zevran replied.

“Well, I deserve both of you,” Christine retorted, breaking the tension and seriousness of the moment well enough for smiles to return. “Now, we have ashes to find, an arl to cure and then a new Grey Warden to induct. And…we might have a couple other candidates to add to the ceremony.”

“What?” Alistair asked as they hefted gear and bags onto themselves in preparation to finish their search for the urn. “Who?”

“Remember Aneirin?” Alistair and Zevran nodded. “The day after our Elvhen Joining, he approached me while you were still asleep,” she said to Zev. “He wanted to know more about the Wardens and after talking more with Wynne and me about it later that day, he said he was thinking very seriously of joining. He’s apparently a perfect shot with his bow and excels at rapidfire.”

“Wow, you got us a recruit!” Alistair said, overjoyed.

“Two, if you count me,” Zev reminded him.

Alistair made a face. “Even in this she bests me.” Christine chuckled at his antics, then he asked, “Who’s the other person?”

“Oghren!”

“Oh, my God,” Zevran groaned. “You have got to be kidding me.”

Alistair laughed out loud. “Drink versus taint.”

“It ought to be interesting,” Christine agreed. “Now come on, let’s do this, boys.”

Things would be different from here on out, for many reasons. But somehow, they were all quite okay with that, and whatever it would bring.


End file.
